The story of the big move

                                    (This was written in 2003 and has nothing to do with anything.

                                                           Sorry about the quality of the pictures.)

Over the years, my wife Jennifer, and our partner  Dave Bowman, and I built three nurseries. The first was in Crownsville, Maryland, close to Annapolis, the second also in Crownsville, a bit larger and closer to Annapolis, and the third was in Strasburg, Virginia. 

November, 2003
Strasburg, Virginia

Well, it all started when we decided that Annapolis was getting too crowded and we thought, "Why don't we all just pick up and move the whole shebang to the country.  It's real pretty out there."

We sold our garden center in Crownsville and that pretty well made finding someplace to go imperative.  It took a while.  We looked in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and finally found just the right spot near Strasburg, Virginia. A nice old house on 25 acres with a beautiful view. Farms and cows and mountains and valleys and streams all around, within walking distance to the Shenandoah River. Everything’s real pretty out here.

And so, like the Clampetts in reverse, we moved from the big city to the country.  We took about 50,000 plants - give or take - plus three households, five dogs a cat, and my mom. We packed everything into the biggest Penske we could rent and moved it all to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. Actually, we packed that big ol' truck from top to bottom seventeen times.

Ok, so then it rained. Remember the rain?  If you live in the East, you might remember that it rained a bit this year. (Remember, this was written in 2003)  In our area, it rained more than any other year in the history of the universe.  It rained for 41 days and 41 nights, breaking the old record. And then on the 42nd day it didn’t rain. On the 42nd day, it was so hot and humid that I almost died. And so I prayed for more rain. And my prayers were answered. We moved plants in the rain, we moved furniture in the rain, we moved five dogs and a terrified cat in the rain. Seventeen truckloads, plus uncounted trips in the pickup, van and cars. 

So we finally got everything here, but we didn’t know where anything was.  When you're unloading a truck in the rain you really don't care about keeping everything in alphabetical order. "Stick 'em over there" is the closest we got to organization, and towards the end, everybody knew better than to ask "Where should I put these?"   And so all the plants got stuck out in a big field and it took us until November to bring some sort of order to our inventory.  We still don’t know where everything is, haven't found  mom yet, but most of the plants have been located and we think we’ll be ready for spring.   

I'm sure that some day we're going to look back on this and laugh.  I'm fairly sure it's going to be worth all the hassle when its all done.  It sure is pretty out here.

So here's the story of the big move.

First we had to find a place to move to.  We started looking in the summer of 2002, and in December, we happened on a little place near Strasburg, Virginia. 

It had a good bit of flat land, a view of the mountains, and a pretty nice house.